Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 23 for the week of Nov19 – 25, 2006. In this issue we cover the hot new BehindUbuntuinterview with Jono Bacon, the mEDUXa release, the free geek burglery,upcoming Ubuntu open week event, changes in Feisty, the promotion ofKurdish Ubuntu in Turkey, and much more.

The Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Spanish CanaryIsland's regional government have released mEDUXa 1.0. mEDUXa is aFree Software GNU/Linux distribution developed for educationalpurposes based on Kubuntu. It will be deployed on 35,000 computers in1100 schools, which represents 325,000 possible users (25,000 teachersand 300,000 students) in the Canary Islands state schools. mEDUXacomes with different profiles, configured thanks to KDE's Kiosk mode.One of mEDUXa's major feature is the profile for young pupils (from 4to 8 years old).

If you haven't been keeping up with the BehindUbuntu interviews, nowis as a good time as ever! Florida, Sausage Dogs and bash.org! Openyour mouth wide in shock as he slips in a full two sentences pimpingJokosher! Get it all in the BehindUbuntu's revealing interview withour very own man of metal, Jono Bacon.http://behindubuntu.org/interviews/JonoBacon/

=== Free Geek Burgled ===

Free Geek is a not for profit community organisation that recycles oldcomputer parts and equipment and supplies them to under-privilegedpeople, schools, and non-profit organisations in exchange forcommunity service. They install Ubuntu on all the machines theydistribute.

As has been announced before, the Ubuntu Quiz-masters schedule weeklyIRC in #ubuntu-trivia. However, next week's quiz is special! Not onlywill the champion receive fame and glory, the lucky winner will beshipped a free Ubuntu Poster, like the one below, as a bonus! So, comeon out on Friday December 1st 22:00 UTC, network with others, and testyour trivia knowledge in an attempt to win an amazingly awesome Ubuntuposter.

A common question has been ''Are there any plans to release Ubuntu6.06.2? If so, when?'' and we've finally gotten an answer. ColinWatson, an Ubuntu developer and Canonical Employee, announced on theUbuntu-devel mailing list that there is no current plans for Ubuntu6.06.2:“I expect we'll do another point release at *some* point just toaggregate updates, but there's no schedule at the moment, and otherthings are higher-priority”You can read Watson's entire message athttps://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-November/022542.html

=== Calling all LoCo Teams! ===

In our pursuit for newsletter excellence, we are always on the lookoutfor new material. One area we are sorely missing stories from is allthe marvellous LoCo Teams. We would absolutely love it if you guyscould pass Ubuntu-related stories from your countries and doing so iseasy! Compose an email to ubuntu-marketing at lists.ubuntu.com with ansummary of the article, as much relevant linkage as you can find andif the articles are not in English, full English translations would bemuch appreciated.

How good can the UWN get? With your help, the possibilities are endless!

== LoCo News ==

Welcome to the new LoCo Team News Section where we'll feature news,articles, and stories about and from our Ubuntu Loco Teams. If you'dlike to contribute an article, please compose an email toubuntu-marketing at http://lists.ubuntu.com with an summary of thearticle, as much relevant linkage as you can find. If the articles arenot in English, full English translations would be greatlyappreciated.

The week was a little bit quieter than last, with fewer of any of thehigh volumes than usual (GNOME, Telepathy, KDE or XFCE). None theless, there were some interesting and exciting changes that stilllanded. This week we also have a new method of showcasing the changesin Feisty. Rather than throw a blizzard of names and number at you,there is a smaller selection, explaining not only what was uploadedbut the changes you care about. As with any change to the UWN, wewelcome you feedback.

=== General ===

RSIBreak 0.80, the RSI prevention tool for KDE has been uploaded. Newfeatures in this release include more powerful possibilities whenbreaks start or end, a cancel button in the relax pop-up, an option toreset timers only when you're idle for a long break and some other bugfixes. You can read more about RSIBreak athttp://www.rsibreak.org/index.php/Main_Page

Mono 1.2.1 provides the necessary software to develop and run .NETclient and server applications on Linux. 1.2.1 added Thread.Interruptimplementation, numerous bug fixes, web Services now support generictypes (List), Web Services updates for the .NET 2.0 API, a partialport to MIPS architecture, many bug fixes to Windows.Forms, supportfor more type converters, XmlSchema reading and writing, processlaunching will now support opening special files in addition tolaunching programs.

cdrkit 5:1.0, a portable command-line CD/DVD recorder software, wassynced by Scott Remnant. This is a new package for Ubuntu. Seehttp://cdrkit.org for more information.

cupsys 1.2.7 was uploaded this week by Martin Pitt. This includeddocumentation updates, postscript improvements and scheduler fixes,amongst other things. For full details, visithttp://www.cups.org/articles.php?L428

Bluez-gnome 0.6 was uploaded. This release fixes the status iconappearance and adds an application for changing the Bluetoothsettings.

Tomboy 0.5.1 is a simple easy to use desktop note-taking application..5.1 included new managed dbus interaction, search interfaceimprovements, fixed tray icon and panel resizing, removal of the oldtintin image.

Beagle 0.2.13, a search tool that 'ransacks your personal informationspace' to find whatever you're looking for, sees numerous improvementsfrom Edgy's Beagle 0.2.9 including a drastic reduction of memory usageby beagled and beagled-index-helper at startup; improvements to i18nsupport; numerous optimizations; numerous new back-ends such asKNotes, KAddressBook, and Labyrinth; new details pane in UI; many bugfixes including a fix for the dreaded focus stealing bug once and forall; and much more.

Daniel Holbach has uploaded nemiver 0.1.0-0ubuntu1, the new gtkmmfront end to the GNU debugger, gdb. You can read more about nemiver athttp://home.gna.org/nemiver/.

=== Office ===

Abiword 2.4.5, the lightweight word processing software was uploadedthis week by Michael Vogt. This update includes many feature updatesand bug fixes, as well as 10 new or updated translation packs. Seehttp://www.abiword.com/ to find out more about this software.

GnuCash, an open source accounting program, was upgraded from 2.0.1 to2.0.2. This point release included small improvements to the UI andseveral bug fixes including one crasher.

=== Multimedia ===

Audacity 1.2.6, the well known sound recording and editing softwarehas been uploaded by Daniel T. Chen. This release included a bug fixin font size display problems. Also, this new version enabled the FLACsupport that had previously been missing. Read more about Audacity athttp://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Qsynth 0.2.5, is a QT gui interface for FluidSynth. New features inthis release are new dial-knob behavior now follows mouse pointerangular position, middle clicking on a dial resets its position todefault, bank offset finally gets its due effect, while on thechannels and channel preset selection dialogs, new fancy widget,qsynthKnob, with some modifications to replace the actual *ugly* QDialwidgets.

Muine is a music player for Gnome featuring a simple, intuitive userinterface; Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and MP3 music playback support;Automatic album-cover fetching via MusicBrainz and Amazon; Support forembedded album images in ID3v2 tags; ReplayGain support; Support formultiple artist and performer tags per song; and Plug-in support.Brandon Hale uploaded Muine 0.8.6 which fixes an astounding number ofbugs. Full details at http://muine-player.org/wiki/Release_0.8.6

Matt Zimmerman, CTO of Canonical and lead distro team member unveiledthe new Feisty Release Plan, showcasing the general themes for thenext release, general time frame (Feisty will be a standard 6 monthrelease cycle again), support life cycle, changes for developers andmore. You can read more at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeistyReleasePlan

Kurdish Ubuntu was prepared by a team of hardworking translators(https://launchpad.net/people/kurdish ) in Rosetta. In his talk at thereception, the mayor of Sur (a town in Diyarbakir) said that “Whateverlanguage it is in, we wanted it “our service” to be accessiblemulti-lingually because multilingualism is our wealth. Our work isbeing conducted on Kurdish, English, and Turkish language support. …If we can integrate multilingualism, multi-identities, andmulti-culturalism in this nation, this region will be a place of peaceinstead of conflicts.”

Mehmed Uzun, a Kurdish writer, speaking about the Kurdish language,told the attendees that “Our most important problem is that thelanguage is not standardized. The Kurdish language should bestandardized.” Ubuntu was later distributed to the reception'sattendees. You can find screenshots of the Kurdish Ubuntu athttp://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Kurdish_Linux_launched_in_Turkey

=== Ubuntu in the OLPC mix: An Interview at ZDNet ===

MIT Media Lab guru Nicholas Negroponte has been grabbing the headlinesrecently with his One Laptop Per Child project. The aim is to create acheap  about $100  and robust laptop for use in the developingworld. Negroponte is adamant that ownership of the device is key tohelping children engage with technology. However, the OLPC project isnot the only organisation to have focused on the lack of computingdevices and infrastructure in the developing world.

An alternative to both the refurbished PCs and the OLPC approach hasbeen developed by two UK academics. Ndiyo, the Swahili word for “yes”,is a project that aims to allow multiple users access to the same PC.The brain-child of Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a former researchscientist at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, Ndiyo is based around theuntapped ability of the Linux operating system (Ubuntu) to supportnumerous simultaneous users.

In just two years, Ubuntu has become one of the most popular Linuxdistribution in the world with millions of users and a spot regularlyat the top of Distrowatch. Ever wondered what all the fuss is about?How we've achieved such a great feat in such a short space of time?With the upcoming Ubuntu Open Week, you can do just that!

The Ubuntu community and Ubuntu's corporate sponsor Canonical isholding a series of online workshops where you can:

* learn about the Ubuntu landscape; * talk to some of the key developers from the Ubuntu project; * find out about the Community and its relationship with Canonical; * participate in an open Q&A with Mark Shuttleworth, the founderof Ubuntu; and * much more…

The week takes place between '''Mon 27th Nov and Sat 2nd Dec 2006'''and more information about the event (including a schedule of theweek's events) can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek.

As you may know, a winmodem is a software modem designed to work withthe Microsoft Windows operating system. A traditional modem useshardware to perform its tasks, but Winmodems perform their key taskswith software. This makes them smaller and cheaper to produce, but italso means they cannot be easily used on other operating systemsbecause the driver support requires far more effort to produce. Thisspecification proposes including drivers for supported winmodems bydefault andr working with the upstream project (http://linmodems.org)to develop drivers for winmodems that are currently unsupported.

The new Flash plugin 9 beta will be backported to 6.06 in the comingweek. It requires “DEBIAN_FRONTEND=interactive” in order to install,though, so if you have trouble installing run {{{DEBIAN_FRONTEND=interactive dpkg –configure -a }}}

“However, only certain people have the authoirty[sic] to determinewhich specs are worthy of discussion at a meeting like the UbuntuDeveloperSummit in Mountain View, and fewer still can approve a specfor official inclusion in Ubuntu.”

Actually, this is backwards. Approving specs for meetings is done bythe Technical Board (four people at present), while we have beenfarming the job of approver out to increasing numbers oflonger-serving core developers. We had a conference call shortlybefore the summit with IIRC at least six of us going through the listand figuring out which of us would be best suited to make sure eachdiscussion was going in a sensible direction.

Cheers,

Colin Watson“

The UWN Team would like to apologize for any confusion that this errormay have caused and much thanks to Colin Watson for letting us know.